Norway plans to ban semi-automatic firearms as of 2021, a decade after right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s mass shooting that left 69 people dead.
A bill proposing the ban was presented last year by the Norwegian government, and there is a parliamentary majority in support ahead of a vote, a lawmaker has said.
Plans for the ban has been underway since 2012, with the delay in drafting the proposal attributed to many hunters in Norway using semi-automatic firearms.
Murderer: The ban on semi-automatic weapons would come into force decade after right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik shot and killed 69 people, mostly teenagers, at a youth camp
The bill allows for several exemptions, in particular for shooting sports, but was not immediately clear how the new law would affect hunters.
‘Today (Tuesday), it has become clear that there is a parliamentary majority in favour of the government’s proposal. Semi-automatic weapons will therefore be banned in Norway,’ Peter Frolich, a Conservative member of parliament’s standing committee on judicial affairs, told AFP.
The Utoya massacre in Norway took place on July 22, 2011, when Breivik entered a Norway Labour Party youth camp disguised as a police officer.
Armed with a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a Glock pistol, Breivik killed 69 people, most of them teenagers.
Just a few hours before the camp attack, he had killed eight people in a bombing outside a government building in Oslo.
Plans for the ban has been underway since 2012, with the delay in drafting the proposal attributed to many hunters in Norway using semi-automatic firearms
A report published the following year by a commission tasked with drawing conclusions from the attacks, called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons, one of its 31 recommendations.
‘This decision is a very good thing, even if it comes belatedly,’ the head of a Utoya victims’ support group, Lisbeth Kristine Royneland, said.
Breivik, 39, who now goes by the name Fjotolf Hansen, was sentenced in 2012 to 21 years in prison, which can be extended indefinitely as long as he remains a threat to society.
The ban comes amid renewed debate on semi-automatic weapons in the United States, following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida that claimed the lives of 17 students and teachers on February 14.
A former student, Nikolas Cruz, 19, who authorities say was expelled last year for unspecified disciplinary problems and had numerous run-ins in the law, has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.
He is accused of carrying out the shooting rampage with a semiautomatic AR-15-style assault weapon that he legally purchased from a licensed gun dealer last year, when he was 18 years of age.